Sunny | Fairy Bells | Jim Larson | Selene Complies | Top Wrestlers | Board Workshop | Garden Talk | Communication Etiquette | 2025 Supes | Haschak Radio | Trustee Vacancies | Dance Brigade | KZYX Finance | Hospital Whiskey | Rhododendron Sale | Bark Remnants | Ed Notes | 1909 Postcard | Yesterday's Catch | Cultivator's Handbook | Marco Radio | Go Cats | Kushner Book | Important Stories | Big Insurers | Want Healthcare | L.A. Fires | How Good | Woke Conflagration | From Jersey | Invoking DEI | Water Drops | Watch Duty | Absolute Truth | Low Spark | NPR Listeners | Fresh Laundry | Sako Predicts | H-Bomb Funnies | Censorship Office | Community Store | Looking for Peace | Lead Stories | Aaieeee | Dylan Movie | Dix Couple | Locusts Sang | Dinty Moore's | Suicide Note | Democratic Capitalism | Nurses Rest
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): 43F under clear skies this Saturday morning on the coast. The only matter of note in the forecast is morning low temps will be in the upper 30's the next several days.
DRY WEATHER is expected this weekend and all next week. Gusty northerly winds along the coast and robust offshore flow across the interior mountains are expected this weekend and early next week. (NWS)
DEAR FRIENDS OF MENDOCINO THEATRE COMPANY:
It is with great sadness that we are informing you that Jim Larson, beloved husband of our gifted and accomplished scene designer Diane Larson, died suddenly on Monday, January 6. Many of us will remember Jim as the tall and handsome man, always ready with a smile, at Diane’s side at opening night galas. Diane and Jim have been a part of our MTC community for decades; he will be missed.
There will be a memorial event for Jim, place, time and date to be determined. We will keep you informed.
AND AT MOTEL SIX…
On 01/03/2025 at approximately 10:15pm a Ukiah Police Department (UPD) Officer was on routine patrol on Leslie Street in Ukiah when he contacted Selene Gonzalez. Gonzalez admitted to being in possession of drug paraphernalia, and a probable cause search was initiated.
In Gonzalez’s purse, UPD Officers located fentanyl, a scale, records of drug transactions, and a significant amount of cash. Additional fentanyl was found on Gonzalez’s person, and after being taken into custody Gonzalez admitted to having additional contraband hidden in her clothing. Gonzalez removed more fentanyl, methamphetamine, ketamine, and drug packaging material from her undergarments.
UPD Officers ultimately obtained the lawful ability to search Gonzalez’s hotel room, where they found more cash, scales, transaction records, a false compartment in a soda can, and commercial quantities of methamphetamine, fentanyl, and heroin. A check of Gonzalez’s criminal history revealed that she had multiple prior convictions for drug possession. Gonzalez was arrested and transported to the Mendocino County Jail where she was booked for various felony charges related to controlled substances for sale, and a false compartment.
As always, UPD’s mission is to make Ukiah as safe a place as possible and rid the community of dangerous drugs. If you would like to know more about crime in your neighborhood, you can sign up for telephone, cellphone, and email notifications by clicking the Nixle button on our website; www.ukiahpolice.com.
WRESTLING: SIX BOYS RANKED TOP-25 IN THE STATE
Logan Bruce and Jonah Bertoli ranked 10th and 11th, respectively.
by Gus Morris
Six local standouts remained in the top-25 of the newly released state rankings this week.
The familiar collection of names starts with Maria Carrillo senior Logan Bruce and Cardinal Newman junior Jonah Bertoli. Bruce is ranked No. 10 in the state in 175 with Bertoli one spot behind at No. 11. The duo is also ranked 1 and 2 in the North Coast Section in the weight class.
Ukiah junior Jordan Schwarm remained as the No. 8-ranked wrestler in the state in 285 and No. 1 in the NCS. Cardinal Newman junior Devon Bertoli is ranked No. 2 in the NCs in 285 and rose to No. 18 in the state this week.
(pressdemocrat.com)
PART OF NEXT WEDNESDAY’S Board Workshop (Day 2) agenda package is this description of the County Counsel’s office:
“Mendocino County Counsel Overview
“Office of 9 attorneys when fully staffed (currently 8); 3 Deputies devoted to Juvenile Dependency Team, 1 Deputy to Behavioral Health and Probate litigation.
The five attorneys outside the juvenile dependency team, (including County Counsel and Assistant County Counsel) each share responsibility for several assigned departments and/or tasks.
These tasks include everything from legal advice and opinions, litigation, records requests (PRAs and third-party subpoenas), contracts, etc., including, but not limited to the following departments or tasks:
AAB; Agriculture/Farm Advisor; ALUC; Animal Care Services; Appeals/Writs; Assessor/ Clerk/ Record/ Elections; Auditor-Controller/ Treasurer-Tax Collector; Bail Bonds; Behavioral Health & Recovery Services (Mental Health/ BHAB/ Substance Use Disorder Treatment); Board of Supervisors; Cannabis; Child Support Services; Clerk of the Board; Code Enforcement (Cannabis/DOT/EH/PBS); Executive Office (IT/OES/Risk Management/PRRM); Emergency Medical Services; Environmental Health; General Services (Central Services/Facilities & Fleet/Parks); Grand Jury; Human Resources; Library; Litigation; Museum; Planning & Building Services; Planning Commission/ MHRB; Probation (Adult/Juvenile/ Juvenile Hall); Public Administrator; Public Conservator (LPS); Public Defender; Public Guardian (probate); Public Health/Health Officer; Sheriff’s Office; Social Services (Adult & Aging Services/ Family & Children’s Services/ Employment & Family Assistance); Transportation; Water Agency.”
Ok, ok. We get it, lots of departments and their occasional referrals (not enumerated).
What’s interesting about this summary is that there’s no mention of hiring outside law firms or attorneys or the process used to identify them, vet them, hire them, monitor them, extend their contracts time and again, and verify the quality of the work.
(Mark Scaramella)
MEMO OF THE WEEK
Communication Etiquette for BOS Agenda and Constituent Matters
To ensure effective and respectful communication among all parties involved in BOS agenda items and constituent matters, please adhere to the following guidelines:
- New Agenda Item
Consult with both the CEO and the relevant Department Head to discuss and ensure alignment. Share your DRAFT agenda summary with the DH in advance of publication and invite feedback that may clarify or strengthen the item.
- Posted Agenda Item
In advance of the meeting, communicate directly with the Department Head via email or phone if you have questions or concerns regarding a posted agenda item. Include the CEO in this communication for awareness.
- General Questions or Information Requests
Reach out directly to the appropriate Department Head. CC: the CEO or the DCEO assigned to the department for awareness of any issue.
- Constituent Complaints
Verify that the constituent has utilized all available channels within the department to resolve their issue. This approach helps BOS members avoid becoming intermediaries in departmental matters. When contacting a Department Head regarding a complaint, please allow up to 48 hours for a response, as they may need time to address their current priorities before responding.
For urgent or significant complaints, include the CEO in the communication, whether by email or phone, for visibility and expedited handling.
This protocol helps ensure clear and efficient communication while respecting the workflow of all parties involved.
Darcie Antle
Chief Executive Officer
Mendocino County
MENDOCINO COUNTY SUPERVISORS 2025
(front) Vice-Chair Bernie Norvell and Supervisor Madeline Cline
HASCHAK & SHIELDS
This Saturday, Jan. 11th at 12:30pm, 3rd District Supervisor John Haschak will appear on KPFN on “This & That” with Jim Shields. They will be talking about the Board of Supervisors first meeting this year this past Tuesday, as well as numerous other topics and issues, including the Cannabis Department’s illegal action doubling the size of weed cultivation areas, the Supes right-on approval of eliminating votes to abstain, and the latest developments in the Cubbison legal mess. Tune in to KPFN, 105.1 FM, also streamed live: http://www.kpfn.org.
RUBBER STAMP SEEKS PAD
Mendocino-Lake Community College District Board of Trustees, Trustee Vacancy*
The Mendocino-Lake Community College District Board of Trustees is accepting applications to fill a vacancy in Trustee Area #4 and Trustee Area #7. Trustee Area #4 includes Hopland, Boonville and Mendocino. Trustee Area #7 includes Lakeport and Kelseyville.
The Board is responsible for the performance of the Mendocino-Lake Community College District, which serves approximately 8,000 students and provides vital educational services to the various communities in the region.
The Board is seeking candidates who have the ability and time to fulfill the responsibilities of being a member of the board. To be eligible, an individual must be at least 18 years old; must be a resident of the district and reside in Trustee Area #4 or Trustee Area #7; must be a registered voter; and must not be disqualified from holding civil office by the Constitution or any law of the state. In addition, candidates may not be an employee of the district. Those interested are invited to contact the Mendocino College President’s office at 468- 3071 or visit http://www.mendocino.edu/board to obtain an application.
Completed applications https://www.mendocino.edu/sites/default/files/2024-11/Trustee%20Vacancy%20Notice%20Letter%20and%20Application%20fillable_Rv.pdf are to be mailed to the address below or emailed to tkaras@mendocino.edu
Board of Trustees, c/o Superintendent/President, Mendocino College, 1000 Hensley Creek Road, Ukiah, CA 95482
Applications must be received no later than Thursday, January 16, 2025 at 4:00 PM.
The selection will be made at an open meeting of the Board of Trustees which will take place in January or February 2025.
SAKINA BUSH
In case you missed this… Marco has been telling us this for years
“And speaking of scams: Just the manager and one other person in the management suite of KZYX suck out of the station for themselves every penny of the membership money - you know, that money that they're always saying you should sent them, to join them, and help keep all the great shows on the air. 2000 fifty-dollar annual memberships equal $100,000. The manager alone pays herself $60,000 and perks. Meanwhile KZYX is swimming in regular donor-class donor money and an annual six-figure grant from CPB, enough to buy a chunk of prime real estate in Ukiah incl. non-leaking structures that could've been moved into last year and not even feel it. The various interchangeable managers could've been paying the airpeople all along but they never did. The manager could start paying them now. The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time is right now. One three-minute telephone call from the manager to the bookkeeper. The directors on the board are always saying they have no say in hiring and firing and other decisions the manager makes. They don't even have to be involved.” — Marco McClean
Thank you Marco.
RHODOS!
Rhododendron Sale Noyo ARS
Noyo Chapter ARS Winter Rhododendron Sale
Saturday 1/11/25 9-2
cash or checks only
300 S. Main Street Ft. Bragg
Maple and Main
110 varieties-over 400 plants
$20.00 for 1 gallon plants
devon750@mcn.org
ED NOTES
YOU'RE A BONA FIDE old timer if you remember Weise's Inn in downtown Boonville, and you're getting there if you remember Mel “Boom-Boom” Baker as superintendent of the local schools.
IT MAY HAVE BEEN NANCY GRACE, Nancy being a guilty pleasure of mine, where Nance snarled, “Why the hell did it take so long to find her?” I think I might have the answer to that one.
I've mostly lived in tiny, rural Boonville for nearly 60 years. In that time Boonville's population has turned over five times: Old Timers; Arkies and Okies: Hippies; Mexicans; Wealthy Retired and, now, Weekend Credit Cards.
I SEE PEOPLE at the Boonville Post Office I've never seen before, and every time I go to a public meeting I see a person I don't know sitting up front at the power table.
UNTIL 1980 I saw the same people every day, and I silently rejoiced at being a member of an identifiable, coherent community composed of specific people, most of us feeling blessed to live beyond the chaos to the south.
ANY MORE we're lucky if we know the names of our nearest Boonville neighbors, a few of whom take advantage of the prevalent social atomization to do bad things that Nancy Grace would definitely not approve of.
A COUPLA CITY STORIES
IT WAS HOTTER than hot that Thursday and I, like all of San Francisco, am never ready for extreme heat. It was so hot as I trudged past the open doors of the fancy stores on Union Square's north side I'd pause to refresh myself in the full blast of their air conditioning through their open doors onto the street, surprised that the titans of high fashion would give up that kind of random relief to the non-consuming public until it occurred to me that the AC was one more enticement. “Get out of the heat. Come in here where it’s cool and buy yourself a $5,000 purse.”
I’D THOUGHT about walking all the way out to the Richmond, which I often do to baste myself in the urban ambiance, but if I was already a staggering, dehydrated wreck after a couple of blocks I knew I’d have to continue my trip west on the 2 Clement bus. I'd catch it on Sutter, at 500 Sutter, where a small but memorable act of random kindness soon occurred, one of those random kindnesses you see advertised on the vehicles of people who, from appearances, don't look very kind, and seen most frequently on the Golden Gate Bridge to and from Marin County, a very, very kind place, evidently.
I WAS STANDING at 500 Sutter with a half-dozen other potential heat stroke victims waiting for Muni's mobile hot box to wheeze into view when a black man in a doorman's uniform suddenly appeared. “Please come in,” he said, beckoning us to the cool interior of the building, “it's a lot nicer in here.” It was, too, and we all thanked him and stood around smiling at each other until the bus came.
ANOTHER STORY. On a day when all the news was about an East Bay kidnapper and the terrible account of an 11-year-old boy on his way home from baseball practice randomly stabbed by a street nut on the 14 Mission bus, I climbed cautiously aboard the 1 California, the most sedate bus line in the City to travel from the Pacific to the Bay.
THE PUDGY MAN opposite me was reading. Muni bus seating is often designed in a way that forces passengers to sit opposite each other. I've never been able to read on a bus or any other public place. The human distractions are more interesting than most books.
THE MAN OPPOSITE was reading ‘Love and Friendship’ by Allan Bloom, holding the book up so the title was provocatively in my face. I felt sorry for the reader. Is there a more surefire guide to remaining lovelorn all one's days than a how-to by Allan Bloom?
HE WORE earrings and hiking shorts, and what looked like a tux shirt, but America having become a kind of sartorial crap shoot, I drew no conclusions. “Excuse me, sir. If you allow me to burn that book I will be your friend all the way to the Embarcadero.” He wouldn't understand, so I beat back the foul impulse and tried to mind my own business with Allan Bloom directly in my viewshed.
PERHAPS in retaliation for what he may have sensed as my disapproval of his reading matter, the guy held the big hardbound library book up in front of his face so I couldn't help but stare back at the irritating title for the next mile and a half.
JUST before the offending title became unendurable, L&F got off at Divisadero, but not before he'd stashed the book in a colorful handwoven Third World handbag from which he'd simultaneously produced a little bottle of perfume to daub himself on each cheek and, damn! I was hit right in the face with White Shoulders, the only scent I know, and I was back in high school at the Junior Prom.
I WENT DOWN to the Embarcadero Theater to see a documentary-like movie about the Bader-Meinhof Gang, a small group of left-wing German revolutionaries similar to our Weathermen only more capable, narrowly speaking, both groups lacking, to put it mildly, popular support, although the Germans got themselves a 25% approval rating briefly, at least according to this movie. Unlike the Weathermen, rich kids whose parents and connections later got most of them off while prole bomb throwers like the SLA's Joe Remiro are buried in state prisons for life, Bader-Meinhof was competent enough to build bombs without blowing themselves up. There was a large turnout for the matinee, which surprised me because I didn't think there'd be much interest in the subject matter, but maybe the film's good reviews as a film, as art, were responsible for the crowd, but then again maybe there was a big turnout because things are again polarizing in extreme ways, and maybe some people are again thinking about offing the pig, as the pig was promiscuously defined but seldom offed however defined in the late sixties and early seventies. The movie's pretty good. Except for some cartoon Arabs and gratuitous frontal nudity by women way too attractive to pass for 60s radicals (unless the German rads were a lot better looking than their American counterparts, which I doubt), it sticks to the known facts. What surprised me, though, is at the end of the movie, a very long movie, a kidnapped industrialist is gunned down because he is who he is, and about a third of the audience applauded and cheered, an audience containing almost no one under the age of 50. In the film the murdered man had been trundled around by his abductors for a couple of weeks. His killers had gotten to know him, this uncomprehending capitalist who was depicted as not anywhere near the level of pure evil achieved by, say, Dick Cheney, or any number of sixties people, left and right. This was a guy the German revolutionaries might have spared if they'd had any thought about establishing themselves in the popular mind as the way to a more sensible social organization, if they'd thought of establishing themselves as an example of revolutionary humanity, if they'd thought about anything except their fantasy of scaring capitalism out of existence. Nope. They shot him, and the comfortable audience in a comfortable theater in a rich, comfortable, police-protected city clapped and cheered and went out into the comfortable late afternoon sun chuckling over that last visual of the dead fat man.
JACK SAUNDERS:
Back in the day people used to have photos taken and made into postcards for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it was to show off their home, sometimes their family, etc., and sometimes it was even to announce their engagement. This is an example of the latter.
This postcard was mailed from Boonville on 9 Nov 1909, and the writer noted that "Luster and Miss Nissen is [sic] to be married to-morrow."
The people referenced were John Luster Bivans and Jessie May Nissen, and they were, in fact, married 10 Nov 1909 in Point Arena. By 1910 they were living in San Francisco, where Luster (as he was more commonly known) was a shoe salesman, but by 1918 they were back in Mendocino County where he worked for the Goodyear Redwood Company in Elk. By 1920 he was a farmer near Boonville, and afterward he and Jessie ran a grocery store in/around Boonville.
The comment I've heard most about this card is, "Was this girl a 15 year-old?" but she was not. In fact, Luster was born in 1884 in Boonville, and Jessie was born in 1883 in Point Arena, so they were about 25-26 when they married. Jessie passed away in 1968 in Boonville, and Luster passed away in 1984 just a few months before what would have been his 100th birthday. The couple had no children. Today they rest in Evergreen Cemetery in Boonville.
CATCH OF THE DAY, Friday, January 10, 2025
HOMERO ALVARADO-VALENCIA, 44, Fort Bragg. Probation revocation.
ABDULMAJID DAHDOULI, 27, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury.
JOHN DOYLE, 36, Ukiah. Controlled substance, concealed dirk-dagger, offenses while on bail, failure to appear.
VANESSA ELIZABETH, 55, Ukiah. Petty theft with prior, probation revocation. (Frequent flyer.)
SCOTT FABER, 45, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.
EDUARDO GARDEA JR., 40, Ukiah. Parole violation.
KELLY GREGORY, 58, Redwood Valley. Fugitive from justice.
SEAN HAMMON, 54, Ukiah. Reckless driving, failure to appear, probation revocation.
GORDAN HANOVER, SR. 52, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, unspecified offense, probation violation.
NATHAN MORALES-SALDANA, 34, Covelo. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, controlled substance.
KRISTO OUSEY, 40, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs, paraphernalia, parole violation. (Frequent flyer.)
CHEYENNE PETERSON, 20, Ukiah. Disobeying court order.
WILLIAM POWELL II, 49, Ukiah. Probation revocation.
GERALD SIMPSON, 54, Willits. Controlled substance, unspecified offense, parole violation.
DESTINY TURNEY, 34, Ukiah. Shoplifting, controlled substance, unspecified offense, probation revocation.
ARTURO VALDEZ, 42, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-loitering, disorderly conduct-alcohol.
FRED GARDNER: Published by the Agrarian Reform Company, Eugene, Oregon, 1970.
MEMO OF THE AIR: Good Night Radio show all night tonight on KNYO and KAKX!
Soft deadline to email your writing for tonight's (Friday night's) MOTA show is 6pm or so. Or send it whenever it's done, after that, and I'll read it on the radio next week. Or maybe tonight anyway if I look at email on a music break.
Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is every Friday, 9pm to 5am PST on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg and KNYO.org. The first three hours of the show, meaning till midnight, are simulcast on KAKX 89.3fm Mendocino.
Plus you can always go to https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com and hear last week's MOTA show. By Saturday night I'll put up the recording of tonight's show. Also there you'll find an assortment of cultural-educational amusements to occupy you until showtime, or any time, such as:
In hindsight, the man-inspiring beef-jerky voice Democrats should have used. If this is the right link. I can't check it, I'm on dialup today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD4ldC3TJdg
The sea serpent polka. Video, and sheet-music cover art. It wasn't that long ago that every town had at least one store that sold sheet music. And there were dance schools. And shoe repair shops. And drinking fountains and public bathrooms, and mechanical self-cleaning ashtrays that spun like a flying saucer inside when you pushed down the top part. One ex-husband of Juanita's now-long-dead childhood friend made a living working in a store that sold nothing but flags of all nations, and you could sit at the counter in the drug store and enjoy an egg-salad sandwich the size of a melon, and a milkshake, and read through four pounds of newspaper, all for $1.65. https://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/the_sea_serpent_polka
And "In order to ensure that the flat faces meet and are flush, they're actually married /before/ the hardening process. That's quite unique, for scissors." (via Kottke) https://kottke.org/25/01/how-ernest-wright-makes-scissors
Marco McClean, memo@mcn.org, https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
ONLY A PAWN IN THEIR GAME: NOTES ON RACHEL KUSHNER’S CREATION LAKE
by Jonah Raskin
Almost all novels, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility to One Hundred Years of Solitude and today’s mass market best sellers, are political whether the author intends them to be political or not. Some, like Gore Vidal’s Burr and Lincoln, are more overtly political than others. As literary critics have long noted, novels tend to evade the conscious control of writers, and sooner or later politics and power struggles rear their beautiful or ugly heads. Fictional characters move beyond the author’s blueprint.
Rachel Kushner’s previous novels — The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room and Telex from Cuba — are about power; those who wielded it and those who are seriously messed up by it. in her new novel, Creation Lake, which takes place in the present day in a part of France far from tourists and tourism — and which can seem like a Third World country — she traces a group of women and men who belong to a subculture, and who might be called environmentalists, anarchists and anti-capitalists. They can be found around the world.
By placing her story at the periphery, Kushner hopes to unlock secrets that lie at the centers of power and to understand the motives of characters who are idealists, nihilists, intellectuals, dreamers and more.
In the December 2024 issue of Harper’s in an article titled “In the Rockets’ Red Glare” Kushner describes her explorations in the subculture of hot rodders and their hot rods. She finds them surprisingly appealing because they go against the American grain and against America’s dominant car culture. But as the title of the article suggests they’re also patriotic Americans.
Cars roar across the pages of Creation Lake; there’s a Skoda, a Citroen or two and a Chrysler Sebring. They say something about the individuals who drive them and who are in turn driven by them. The person who tells this tale of conspiracy, paranoia, intrigue and betrayal is not one of the wanna be revolutionaries, but an agent provocateur from California named Sadie Smith who once was employed by the FBI and by government agencies.
Because she has made a mess of things, as agent provocateurs often do, she now works for global capitalists and their cronies and is paid well to fuck things up. Because she has axes to grind, she qualifies as an untrustworthy narrator. I was often unconvinced of her veracity. It’s best not to believe everything she says. She writes for example about “the average French person,” though it’s likely that no such person exists except in the mind of Marine Le Pen and her followers.
I was initially drawn to Creation Lake because I have traveled as an American outsider in parts of the region Kushner describes, and because I have followed the antics of a French underground organization that published in 2007 a manifesto titled The Coming Insurrection. Its members were linked to the Tarnac Nine, a group of defendants arrested and charged with terrorism. Some of the characters in Creation Lake seem to be cut from the same and similar clandestine cloth.
In December 2024 I went to see Kushner speak in San Francisco and heard her describe two of her main characters: one a “post revolutionary”; and the other as a “counter revolutionary.” Sadie Smith fits the profile of the counter revolutionary, and Bruno Lacombe the post revolutionary, though he might say that he’s more of a genuine revolutionary now than he was in ’68.
I was also drawn to Creation Lake because I have long been an admirer of Frederick Engels’ classic, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which explores the tangled genesis and evolution of what might be called humanity’s most toxic unholy trinity. Engels concluded that every advance in human history was also a step backward. Big losses have accompanied important gains. That’s what Bruno would say.
Creation Lake is clearly a novel of ideas. It’s also an action-packed thriller that maps the essential provocative role that the agent provocateur plays in the protests that are described in the novel, and that culminates in the death of a government minister and the mass arrests of demonstrators. Kushner weaves together a large cast of characters. She also maps the complex dialectical workings of fate, free will and chance: what is determined, what is freely chosen and what is due to happenstance.
As an agent provocateur and as an unreliable narrator Sally Smith is not endearing. She lies, manipulates, dissembles and fucks things up big time. But she is definitely a complex character. To borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, she’s “only a pawn in their game,” but as a pawn she exploits people ruthlessly. Pawns can win or lose a game.
Near the end of the novel Sally hands a gun, a P38, to an American radical/ criminal adrift in France. He’s named Burdmoore. She urges him to assassinate a minor French official. He declines the offer and says, “You want me to use this thing?” He adds “You think I’m seriously going to run at this guy, in front of all these people with cops bearing down and fucking shoot him? Are you nuts?”
She is probably out of her mind. Burdmoore keeps the gun as a souvenir and calls Sally “some crazy chick.” Indeed it takes a certain madness to become an agent provocateur, to sow the seeds of destruction, betray confidences and destroy intimate connections.
If you were in Chicago in ’68, in Seattle in 1999 during the meetings of the WTO or if you have been the target of illegal surveillance then this book is definitely for you.
(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.)
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… A person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story – from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace – is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night
IN JULY, STATE FARM, one of the biggest insurers in California, canceled 1600 homeowner policies in Pacific Palisades. A year earlier, the same insurance company had dropped more than 2,000 policies in the nearby neighborhoods of Brentwood, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, and Monte Nido, all of which have now been ravaged by devastating wildfires. But the big insurers who have canceled policies for homeowners and businesses in climate-vulnerable states continue to insure the fossil fuel industries that make people’s homes uninsurable.
— Jeffrey St. Clair
MITCH CLOGG
When I was born, a bridge in neighboring Pennsylvania was rededicated from a railroad bridge to one for cars. That was October, 1938, a month after I was born in Baltimore. Ten years later, the wooden-truss bridge burned when oil-soaked debris and a layer of oil on the surface of Pennsylvania’s Monongahela River caught fire. In 1948, when I was ten, Pittsburgh and surrounding places were evacuated because the air was unbreathable. Twenty died before they could escape the toxic industrial air.
The year before that, an explosion and fire in Houston, Texas killed an unknown number of people. It is counted as the U.S.’s worst industrial accident, with 581 bodies recovered and identified, unknown numbers of people never found and others never identified or counted because the remains were too little to assess.
In March, 1962 I flew my small airplane over Ocean City, Maryland to see the resort after a persistent nor’easter had washed much of it away. “OC” had been my family’s summer home. Houses had been floated off their foundations and carried blocks away. Others were turned to rubble and swept out to sea. The cyclonic nor’easters have been so called since the 1600s because the winds at the surface blow from the northeast.
Also in the Sixties, my employer, the Baltimore News-American, had me fly over the state after a bad blizzard had paralyzed much of Maryland. The Chesapeake Bay was frozen and empty except for an ice-breaker chugging toward the Eastern Shore—that portion of Maryland between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake. Small communities were cut off by deep snowdrifts on the roads and highways. Needed medicines were available only to those who could be reached by helicopters.
These are just a few grabs from my eighty-six years of watching and/or floundering through various disasters. (They include the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, countless wars big and little, my own family’s sudden death by drowning, and—you name it.)
So why does this so-cal fire seem so—um—special?
It’s all of a piece. Western democracy is (probably…possibly…likely?) abolished by the chaos brought to American affairs by a once-and-future president who would be/might be king, and the entire planet is bearing the consequences of human greed, carelessness, cleverness, unacceptable ignorance and indifference to current affairs, led by—whom?
You got it right: the United States of America, the Big Dog, the sole super-power, the City on the Hill, the God-anointed cradle of modern democracy, the poster-child for capitalism, proof positive of Scottish philosopher Adam Smith’s description of it as imperialism’s replacement, his prescription and caution of it in his majestic “The Wealth of Nations”. Despite our might, we watch tearfully as men and women fight fire to save L.A., America’s miraculous propagandist and dream maker, capitalism’s court jester, Hollywood.
Entertainment is one export that was not wrecked by Clinton-Gore’s North American Free Trade Agreement and all the foolish industry-exporting initiatives, foreign and domestic, that followed. Hit by plague, strikes, and, now, fiery apocalypse, our TV, movie, radio and internet infrastructure is ablaze. It’s almost enough to make an atheist believe in God.
And it’s something more. These L.A. fires have a biblical quality, as if our collective tongue is being cut out. Our principle story-telling organs are going up in flames—at least those on our Left Coast. We have designated one who should only be a curiosity, a peculiar child-man with an even more peculiar charisma, a stupid-but-effective idiot, a creature of immeasurable malignity—to be our (how hard it is to complete this sentence!) leader.
But rest easy. All is not yet lost. It may be that America no longer has enlightenment to share with the world, no longer has the status-insuring technical dominance, has soiled its honor and soured the world’s admiration and regard. Nevertheless, a policy we adopted after the last world war, the practice of destabilizing every other would-be power center in order to claim the world’s natural resources and cheap labor for ourselves—this policy succeeds in “cauldronizing” the planet, keeping everything boiling so vassal-nations cannot determine their own affairs but must defer to our wishes; they must fight to survive the “low-level conflicts” we find so useful to our hegemony and OUR WEAPONS INDUSTRY!
Many of the armament-building concerns are at risk of fire damage, but the various “complexes” (military-industrial, medical-industrial, pharmaceutical-industrial, on & on) are distributed across the country and around the world. The losses from the L.A. fires will not jeopardize their existence or their insurance protection.
Compared to other catastrophes, this one attacks our sense of security disproportionately. That part of the common mind (the “Spiritus Mundi” of W.B. Yeats’ prophetic poem, “The Second Coming”), that part that keeps unconscious track, that totes up our Karma score, is guilty.
“It won’t be rain, but fire next time.”
APOCALYPSE STILL UNSPOOLING
by James Kunstler
"'Climate Change' has been identified: it's a 28-YO man from Reseda in a black hoodie holding a lighter and some matches." — Peach Keenan
“Life imitates art,” Oscar Wilde quipped, a most insightful glimpse into the human condition delivered as a wise-crack. Very Hollywood. Too bad there were no late-night talk shows in Oscar’s time. It took more than eighty years, but the apocalyptic burning of Los Angeles depicted at the climax of Nathanial West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust has finally come — the city of dreams turned into one big flaming nightmare. The adumbrations of this fiasco will darken our national life for years to come.
Who knew that the best way to convert Utopian Woke Democrats back into a reality-based thought system would be to burn their houses down? The wealthy showbiz folk occupying the moral high ground of the Pacific Palisades voted Democratic by 90-percent. They were fully on-board with the agenda of the Party of Chaos, especially Diversity-Equity-and-Inclusion (DEI) and the open border that allowed a deluge of mysterious strangers to flood the country.
Now, reports come across the “X” wires that these mystery folk are cruising the wreckage in the canyons on scooters and in cars to loot anything left of value. The police are shown on video capturing a mystery migrant with a blowtorch suspected of starting the latest outbreak named the Kenneth Fire on the edge of the San Fernando Valley. Loud-and-proud DEI firefighters were stymied in their work by neighborhood fire hydrants that were disappointingly not “full of water,” as they put it. Is that how it works? Each hydrant is supposed to get filled up on a regular schedule by water pixies?
You know by now that LA Mayor Karen Bass was unavailable for the early innings of the conflagration, having flown to the West African nation of Ghana for the inauguration of the new president John Dramani Mahama. But she managed to scramble back in time to mourn the smoldering ruins of Malibu. Governor Gavin Newsom dallied on a smoke-filled street with CNN’s disaster specialist, Anderson Cooper, pretending to manage the situation, which was, in fact, completely out of control. Among the things the governor has been criticized for is poor forest and brush management. Mr. Newsom has been lately working to pass a $25-million bill to fund measures for “Trump-proofing” California. For that same $25-million, he could have hired 500 workers at $50,000-a-year to cut brush around Los Angeles County. That is, if he didn’t avail himself of work-gangs from the California penitentiaries.
Even “Joe Biden” was in town, to announce the creation of a new national monument, the Chuckwalla National Monument, south of Joshua Tree National Park — 125 miles out in the Mojave Desert from LA. But he had helpful phone conversations with Governor Newsom. . . promises of federal funding to build Malibu back better. I wonder if the folks still camping out in tents back in the Mountains of Carolina heard about that. This same week “JB” also announced another $500-million aid package for Ukraine. Anybody wondering why “America First” helped get Mr. Trump elected?
You can’t overstate the amount and degree of family devastation to be endured in the months and years ahead. For one thing, many homeowners recently had their fire insurance cancelled. Decades of punitive bureaucracy made rate increases difficult in wildfire-prone areas, so companies like Allstate decided to quit doing business in the state. So, many of the thousands of lost houses will be total losses. A great many of these were multi-million-dollar houses, even modest ones built in the 1960s, due to the extreme desirability of neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, the Hollywood Hills, and Malibu Beach. Some middle-class people had their entire nest-eggs vested in these houses.
Comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla put out an insightful video rant about just how difficult it will be to rebuild, even if you had homeowner’s insurance — or happened to be a very wealthy Hollywood actor. He put a spotlight on the monumentally obstructive permitting process in Los Angeles County, including additional onerous environmental agency hurdles that anyone would meet attempting to construct a new building in California. Also consider: where are the thousands of competent building contractors going to come from to work on so many replacement houses in one locality at the same time? The bottom-line is that an awful lot of formerly middle-class and even well-off people will be homeless possibly for years ahead. You have not begun to hear about this.
You also have to wonder how this disaster will end up affecting the movie industry. Show business in LA had been on-the-ropes for quite a while preceding the big fire. Woked-up management putting out woked-up movies did enough damage on top of momentous changes in movie exhibition and distribution, writers and actors’ strikes, and super high-priced union labor for movie technicians. The movie business started in LA mainly because of its beautiful Mediterranean climate. You could shoot film outdoors year-round. The industry has been stealthily bailing out of California for years, moving to places like Vancouver and Atlanta. Now, in the smoking ruins, how many showbiz people are ready to run shrieking from the Golden State? And how much is the economic impact of this local disaster a harbinger of a more general national downturn to come? Probably a lot, I’m thinking.
CONSERVATIVES RAGE AGAINST DEI INITIATIVES AS THE CAUSE OF THE L.A. FIRES
by Joe Garofoli
Southern California officials are investigating whether the raging wildfires in Los Angeles County were ignited by power lines, a tossed cigarette or any other of the myriad ways that people or infrastructure ignite blazes. Nowhere on the list: diversity and inclusion policies.
But that hasn’t stopped the conservative media echo chamber from politicizing — and dehumanizing — the loss of human life, homes and business by attributing the tragedy to DEI policies.
The hub of the conservative media’s echo chamber of ignorance is podcaster Megyn Kelly, who said Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley “has made not filling the fire hydrants top priority, but diversity.”
There’s no evidence to back that up, other than Crowley being the department’s first LGBTQ and female chief. The water issue is the responsibility of the L.A. Department of Water and Power. A water department spokesperson told reporters Wednesday that the department received “four times the normal demand (for water) … for 15 hours straight, which lowered our water pressure.”
Elon Musk amplified Kelly’s DEI comments by reposting them and similar chatter on X, the social media site/MAGA peanut gallery he owns, posting that “that DEI means people DIE.”
Conservatives’ argument, to the extent they have one, appears to be that the department has warped priorities, and should have focused more on some policy or action they have yet to articulate that could have prevented the catastrophic conditions that fueled this week’s blazes.
Crowley has spoken of wanting to diversify the department after replacing Ralph Terrazas, who as chief faced charges from a fire commission member of ignoring allegations of racism, sexism, retaliation and abuse endured by women at the department. Former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who appointed Crowley in 2022, called her the “human being who is best prepared to lead” the department after serving 22 years with LAFD as a firefighter, paramedic, engineer, fire inspector, captain, battalion chief, assistant chief, fire marshal and deputy chief.
“Real people are dying. People are losing their homes. They’re being displaced. Let’s have the conversations about why that’s happening, and as opposed to (the right) scapegoating folks and using rhetoric to advance their own political agendas,” Alphonso David, CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum, said Thursday. “Having a diverse fire commissioner does not result in fire.”
David predicts this is a preview of how MAGA world will respond to, well, anything, after Trump takes office this month. David said that Trump and his followers have proposed ridding “federal agencies of ‘DEI’ and and I think this is just a preview of more to come, which is why this type of rhetoric is so incredibly dangerous.”
Nicole Hemmer, a historian and author of the book “Partisans,” said this week on The Daily Blast podcast that it’s an effort to “metastasize disasters,” by telling Trump supporters that “the person responsible for your problems are my political enemies, and instead of focusing on rebuilding, you should focus on hating them.”
That is the opposite of what actually does make America great — our collective experience that becomes stronger when we’re pulling in the same direction. That is what the “E pluribus unum” on the back of the coins in your pocket refers to.
Yet few things light up the MAGAoramuses than invoking DEI. David said far-right leaders use the acronym instead of spelling it out because most people don’t know what it stands for, enabling them to “demonize and mischaracterize it,” because they “want to have that acronym stand for ‘unqualified,’ when in fact, diversity, equity and inclusion simply means you are attempting to address systemic inequities that have existed and continue to exist, within industry, within government, within almost every sector of society.”
Some conservatives have long seen diversity as fundamentally disqualifying.
That belief is what fueled attacks that Vice President Kamala Harris was a “DEI hire” during the campaign in a way that was flat-out racist and sexist, not to mention factually incorrect. It is hard to demean Harris as a DEI hire who benefited from something other than her ability when Harris was twice elected district attorney of a major city then won statewide elections as attorney general and senator in the nation’s most populous state.
Notably, Musk and others have also insulted Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in a similar way this week: Instead of laying out specific policies she should have implemented, they’ve simply tarred her as incompetent.
But conservatives play the DEI card because it inspires nods from the unquestioning echo chamber audience, who need a scapegoat who doesn’t look like them to make them feel better.
“The far right is using a narrative of ‘DEI equals unqualified,’” David said. “And what that means is ‘we want to maintain the status quo. We don’t want to diversify our workforces, we don’t want to diversify our boardrooms, we don’t want to diversify our C suites, because we’re going to label you as unqualified.’ That is the narrative that they are there they are peddling. But that narrative is reckless.’’
In that way, Chief Crowley has become the new Kamala Harris.
“Los Angeles deliberately set out to exclude white men from becoming firefighters, and now they don’t have enough firefighters to prevent their city from burning to the ground,” right-wing commentator Matt Walsh wrote in an X post “DEI is a cancer that destroys everything it touches.”
We’re not hearing a lot of chat from the right about climate change being a factor in the wildfires. Doing so might upset the tender sensibilities of fossil fuel executives, who are about to have a friend in the White House.
Last year, the Washington Post reported that Trump told oil company executives he would lower their taxes and regulatory burdens if they contributed $1 billion to his campaign. Oil and gas interests gave an estimated $75 million to Trump’s presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee and affiliated committees, the New York Times reported in November.
Understanding that climate change fuels worsening fires, or making the connection between Trump’s support from Big Oil and his policy priorities isn’t hard — but MAGA world has decided it wants an even easier out: blaming “DEI.”
(SFChronicle)
WHAT IS WATCH DUTY? How to sign up for the app Californians are glued to for fire news
by Jessica Roy
Like approximately 10 million other people in Los Angeles, I received a terrifying yet erroneous notification Thursday that I was in a wildfire evacuation warning zone.
My group chat with my neighbors — and the one with my book club, and the one for the moms at our day care — promptly exploded. And most of us were saying the same thing: “This can’t be right. Watch Duty says we’re nowhere near the fires.” … “Watch Duty doesn’t show us as an evacuation zone.” … “I’m looking at Watch Duty right now and I don’t see anything.”
A week ago, I’d never heard of Watch Duty, a free app created by a Bay Area nonprofit that displays maps and live updates on fire activity. Now, as deadly wildfires rage across the Los Angeles area, everyone I know is glued to it.
Co-founder and CEO John Mills told multiple media outlets that 1.4 million new people downloaded it between Tuesday and Thursday this week, adding to the 7.2 million users the app had in 2024. It was the No. 1 free app Thursday on both the Apple and Google app stores.
Watch Duty’s ascent in the public consciousness is happening amid the collapse in social media’s utility for reliable live local news updates. Just this week, Meta Platforms Inc. announced it was rolling back fact-checking, and unfounded conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Los Angeles wildfires have proliferated on X, including by President-elect Trump and Elon Musk — earning a rebuke from Watch Duty itself and an admonishment to “do better.”
What is Watch Duty, where does its information come from, and how can you sign up? Read on to find out.
What is Watch Duty?
Watch Duty is an app and website with maps of current fire activity in 22 states west of the Mississippi River, including California. The default settings include active fire perimeters, evacuation zones, power outages (only available in California), shelter locations, and fire weather and red flag warnings. You can also toggle options like live wildfire cameras, satellite hotspots, wind direction and air quality index, as well as live flight tracking for paid members.
If you activate push notifications, you can get alerts about fire activity and updates for fires in the counties you’re monitoring.
It was founded in 2021 by Santa Rosa-based nonprofit Sherwood Forestry Service, helmed by Mills.
How do I sign up for Watch Duty?
You can download Watch Duty as an app in your phone’s app store (iOS and Google Play) or look at it in an Internet browser from the website app.watchduty.org. You don’t need to sign up or create an account to see information from Watch Duty on the website or app. If you create an account from your phone or tablet, you can sign up for notifications and toggle notifications for individual fires.
In the menu at the top left in the app, you can select “Notifications” and select which counties you want to receive notifications for. You can also add an individual place to mark on the map, like your house or a relative’s address.
Is Watch Duty free?
Watch Duty is free for alerts from up to four counties, with the ability to change selected counties. You can scroll around the map and see fire activity anywhere Watch Duty is active. It has no ads. The company, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, offers memberships for $25 a year to help support its mission, and accepts individual donations through the app and website. Membership includes alerts for an unlimited number of counties and a firefighting flight tracker, and it allows users to save more than one place in the app.
There’s also a professional tier of membership intended for government employees and other emergency personnel that lets you see land ownership, infrastructure locations and pre-planned evacuation zones.
How do I know if Watch Duty is accurate?
Watch Duty employs about half a dozen staff reporters and more than 150 volunteers, according to its website. Mills said he was inspired to start the app after a small fire started and was extinguished near his off-the-grid ranch without public updates from local government or media. Less than a year later he was forced to evacuate during the Walbridge Fire, and he found the most reliable information coming on social media from people who were listening to radio scanners and posting updates. He hired many of those people to be his first reporters and volunteers.
Most of the people listed as staff reporters and volunteers on Watch Duty’s website don’t have traditional journalism backgrounds. Most are active or retired fire department or emergency personnel, fire survivors or independent freelance reporters. Many ran or continue to run accounts on Facebook, X and other social media sites dedicated to fire and emergency updates.
The information on Watch Duty is not crowdsourced — in other words, random people can’t submit reports to be automatically included in updates. It all comes from those reporters and established volunteers.
Information comes from a variety of sources, including updates from law enforcement, fire services and other officials, as well as radio communications. Watch Duty’s overview of the process says it uses an automated monitoring system for 911 dispatches. When a report comes in, reporters and volunteers begin to monitor radio scanners, wildfire cameras, satellites and public information sources.
“The team vets all available information and awaits for on-scene personnel to give an official report on conditions,” the website overview says. “If we perceive a threat to life or property, we will notify the affected public via the Watch Duty app. Our reporters follow a strict code of conduct when notifying the public.”
So far, there have been no widespread reports of erroneous information or notifications coming from Watch Duty. It’s a private nonprofit company that doesn’t have government oversight or obligation. Whether that’s a positive or a negative is up to you.
(sfchronicle.com)
THE LOW SPARK OF HIGH HEELED BOYS
If you see something that looks like a star
And it’s shooting up out of the ground
And your head is spinning from a loud guitar
And you just can’t escape from the sound
Don’t worry too much it’ll happen to you
We were children once playing with toys
And the thing that you’re hearing is only the sound
Of the low spark of high heeled boys
The percentage you’re paying is too high priced
While you’re living beyond all your means
And the man in the suit has just bought a new car
From the profit he’s made on your dreams
But today you just read that the man was shot dead
By a gun that didn’t make any noise
But it wasn’t the bullet that laid him to rest
It was the low spark of high heeled boys
If you had just a minute to breathe
And they offered you one final wish
Would you ask for something like another chance
Or something similar to this
Don’t worry too much it’ll happen to you
As sure as your sorrows are joys
And the thing that disturbs you is only the sound
Of the low spark of high heeled boys
If I gave you everything that I owned
And I asked for nothing in return
Would you do the same for me as I would for you
Or take me for a ride and strip me of everything
Including my pride but spirit is something
That no one destroys
And the thing that I’m hearing is only the sound
Of the low spark of high heeled boys
— Jim Capaldi (1971)
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
If a crowd of NPR listeners, eyes bugging out from too many cappuccinos and Maddow conspiracy theories, were to try to disrupt the election certification, the Inauguration or whatever, nobody on CNN would be proclaiming this The Greatest Threat In History To Muh Democracy.
We'd instead be hearing the same pompous talking heads piously remind us about how The Right To Protest Is Sacred. The ghost of St. MLK would be duly invoked.
At the same time, were protesters to try to force their way into an important building, say, NSA headquarters, they'd be shot on sight, and nobody would be waffling and making imaginary snowballs while waiting for orders from Higher Up.
SAKO PREDICTS
My Six Predictions for Investing in 2025
- Talking heads predicting a U.S. stock market decline will be wrong again, as the S&P 500 Index will posts its fourth straight 20%-plus gain in 2025. President Trump will be good for business as he pushes an agenda of deregulation.
M&A activity will pick up. IPOs will take off by mid-year, and Space-X will set a record for the largest IPO ever by raising over $50 billion, giving the company a $600 billion valuation.
While corporate earnings grow 10-13%, the market will start to reach the limits of its valuation, and P/E multiples ending the year will approach those of the internet bubble of 1999. It will be a go time to take profits and short the indexes.
Emerging markets and European stocks once again underperform their U.S. counterparts in 2025.
- President Trump will follow through on campaign promises and announce the creation of a “beautiful strategic Bitcoin reserve to outshine the gold in Fort Knox.” The government will buy $25 billion of Bitcoin to start, and Trump will lay out a goal of 1,000,000 Bitcoins (current value about $100 billion) by the end of his term. Pundits will howl, and the rating agencies will downgrade U.S. debt to AA-, but Bitcoin will rally and will end Trump's first term at over $200,000.
Best way to own Bitcoin? No, it's not in a Bitcoin wallet on a sketchy crypto exchange. Better to open a crypto account at a major brokerage. For example, open Fidelity Crypto® account in just minutes and link it to your Fidelity brokerage account.
For the truly faint-at-heart, Fidelity also has two ETFs: Fidelity® Wise Origin® Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) and Fidelity® Ethereum Fund (FETH).
The companies that help to power crypto and digital payments could also, boost your portfolio: Fidelity® Crypto Industry and Digital Payments ETF (FDIG).
Finally, you can also discover the real potential of a virtual world built on blockchain technology with Fidelity® Metaverse ETF (FMET). My suggestion? Hedge your investment portfolio with a 5% allocation to crypto.
- Russia will come to the negotiating table over Ukraine, but the U.S. will hold tough, with the Trump Administration insisting that the only way to a good deal is through strength.
The President will threaten to introduce NATO troops to the battlefield unless Russia negotiates “in good faith,” and Trump will mobilize U.S. troops in Germany.
After a tense few weeks at DEFCON 2, a settlement will be reached in the summer with Russia keeping Crimea, and most of the territory Russia holds in eastern Ukraine.
A Korean-like demilitarized zone will be established, and the guns will finally fall silent in Ukraine.
- Data centers, electric vehicles, bitcoin mining and continued economic expansion consume massive amounts of electricity, forcing a big evolution in power production and transmission. Fossil fuel production will jump under the Trump administration, with natural gas exports soaring. But the huge winner will be the SMR, or small modular (nuclear) reactor, which can be manufactured in less than half the time as a large nuclear plant.
SMRs are not just miniaturized versions of traditional nuclear reactors; they come with advanced designs that offer unique advantages. Some SMRs are based on technologies like molten salt reactors (MSRs), high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs), and fast reactors. As mentioned earlier, these innovations promise enhanced safety, efficiency, and fuel utilization. These improvements make SMRs a compelling choice for the future.
With SMRs entering the energy landscape, both established nuclear energy companies and innovative startups present appealing investment opportunities for those looking to capitalize on the industry’s growth.
So, which are the best small modular reactor stocks to capitalize on? NuScale Power Corporation (NYSE: SMR) and BWX Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: BWXT).
Another way to play the nuclear energy space is Uranium Energy (NYSE: UEC). When uranium prices cratered following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown, Uranium Energy stepped into the market and started buying shuttered uranium mines and mine development projects and a stockpile of uranium. When uranium prices started to recover, the company generated cash by selling uranium from its stockpile. It used that cash to invest in the portfolio of mines and mine projects it had assembled.
Stocks in the SMR sector will become the “new, new thing” and will be bid up to astronomical heights, even though their revenues will be minimal at first.
- Spurred by a soaring stock market and strong consumer spending, inflation will remain higher in 2025 than the Federal Reserve wants and will average slightly over 3%.
The Fed will cut rates only once, early in 2025, and long-rates start to move higher.
President Trump will threaten to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, and Trump will summon Powell to the Oval Office for a dressing down.
Powell won’t give in, and the yield on the 10-year bond will finish the year over 5%. Allocate to bonds accordingly.
Home sales will continue to be strong in the face of mortgages approaching 8%.
- After Trump deals with Russia, China will be the next Boogeyman.
Sometime in the 2025, China will fire on a Philippine naval vessel patrolling the South China Sea and the "new cold war" suddenly get hotter. It's already plenty hot with China building artificial reefs and archipelagoes to serve as new naval bases in the South China Sea. China has also put a ring around Tawain…not quite a blockade but Tawain is nonetheless isolated.
The Pilipino ship that China will fire upon will catch fire, but it will not sink. It will be towed back to port, with several Pilipino sailors killed.
The U.S., bound by treaty to defend the Philippines, will decline to engage militarily, but instead imposes a 20% tariff on most Chinese products. Other economic sanctions will be imposed, including no new technology transfer licenses. A currency war between the U.S. and China may also ensue.
The Chinese stock market will again suffer, and as the year ends, U.S. consumers will begin to actively boycott Chinese goods. The Chinese stock market may collapse. Filipino patriotism will soar along with a national pride in the entire region of Southeast Asia.
My suggestion? Short the Chinese stock market. Direxion's Daily FTSE China Bear 3X Shares trades as YANG. This ETF shorts 3X the CSI 300 Index (CSIN0301), a modified free-float market capitalization weighted index comprised of the largest and most liquid stocks in the Chinese A-share market. Just dabble in YANG. Allocate 1% or less.
— John Sakowicz
STATE DEPARTMENT DEFIES CONGRESS, REVIVES INFAMOUS CENSORSHIP OFFICE IN ABSURD PRANK
In a hearty double middle-finger to Congress, the "first scalp" of Donald Trump's efficiency campaign is alive and well, back to work with the same mission.
by Matt Taibbi
A Senate staffer compared an infamous State Department unit to Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th fame.
“You can’t kill ’em,” he said. “Every time we try, they pop up somewhere else in the lake.”
Two weeks ago, a celebratory post nearly appeared in Racket after Gabe Kaminsky reported in RealClear Politics that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) had finally been shuttered. GEC was “forced by Congress to close up shop,” Gabe wrote, in a story that’s been personal for us both, since documents emerged last year showing the agency strategized ways to discredit our work. Before the New Year, a watchdog agency sued to obtain records about the episode, litigation still ongoing.
However, I skipped the touchdown celebration after the closure of one of the more notorious bureaucratic characters in the Twitter Files, because I feared exactly what since took place. Just after the New Year, on January 2nd, Gabe reported in the Washington Examiner that as many as 51 GEC employees and tens of millions of dollars were moving in an effort to “realign” the office to a “hub” under a new name. The former GEC would be called the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, or R/FIMI, and report to the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy. The $29.4 million routed to the new “hub” would be “roughly the amount of base funds the GEC currently uses to fund counter-FIMI initiatives through grants and contracts,” a non-public letter dated December 6th and sent to Congress read.
That was bad enough. Two days ago, the mission statement for the new sub-agency leaked out, as reported by Ken Klippenstein. The text:
“The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference Hub (R/FIMI) is a Mission Center energizing a network of U.S. interagency, international, and private sector partners that decisively exposes and counters disinformation and propaganda.”
“Our Mission: To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.”
If that language sounds familiar, you’re not alone. I too felt a flash of recognition. When I looked through the record, I found something shocking…
https://www.racket.news/p/state-department-defies-congress
“THEY PUT SPOTLIGHTS ON ME standing there in the road in jeans and workclothes, with the big woeful rucksack a-back, and asked:—“Where are you going?” which is precisely what they asked me a year later under Television floodlights in New York, “Where are you going?”—Just as you cant explain to the police, you cant explain to society “Looking for peace.”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels
LEAD STORIES, SATURDAY'S NYT
Why the Blazes Overwhelmed L.A.’s Well-Trained Firefighters
Biggest L.A. Fire Spreads Despite Calmer Winds
‘We’re in a New Era’: How Climate Change Is Supercharging Disasters
Los Angeles Is Starring In an All-Too-Real Disaster Story
As L.A. Fires Rage, Trump and Newsom’s Hostilities Resurface
Once the Fires Are Out, California Must Remove Tons of Dangerous Debris
As a Felon, Trump Upends How Americans View the Presidency
HANDS, FINGERS, NOSE AND THROAT: RE-DOING DYLAN
by David Yearsley
On the last Sunday of this past October, a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest broke out in Washington Square Park in New York City. Dozens of participants and thousands of onlookers thronged to the event and when, in the midst of the proceedings, the famed actor himself appeared, the throng went into paroxysms of ecstasy. Seemingly equipped with endless stores of good humor, good looks, and God-given talent, Chalamet made his way through the roiling sea of admirers and impersonators and let himself be photographed with the winner, Miles Mitchell, who had come costumed as Chalamet as Willy Wonka, the title role assumed by the actor in the latest movie remake devoted to the campy chocolatier.
Public spaces should welcome events that range from the sublime to the ridiculous, as well as those that careen off that vast spectrum into the surreal and subversive. The mindless enthusiasm of that Afternoon in the Park with Timmy comes into telling relief when we recall that so many historic protests—from suffragette rallies to anti-war, civil rights and labor demonstrations—have taken place in the shadow of Washington Square’s triumphal arch. Alerted to the look-alike pageant conducted without a permit, the NYPD arrived to disperse the mob, even carting off at least one contestant in handcuffs.
Not even the apocalypse excites like celebrity, except maybe when it is brought face-to-face with its simulacrum.
The mad appeal of this competition of appearances derives from its in-person-ness. Thanks to AI and other forms of techno-trickery, images, people and facts are now rampantly faked on screens of all sizes, not to mention goggles, glasses and headsets. Holographic Cary Grants can be made to smooch with holographic Michael Jacksons. A digital waxwork Jimmy Carter can rise from his Capitol coffin to tickle an ersatz Shah, not an impersonator per se, but a by-the-numbers dictator resplendent in 3D. Yet at the time of writing, there is still no substitute for the presence of real people—for a star’s charisma and a worshipper’s scream and shudder.
Notwithstanding Washington Square’s status as a vital site of protest, it was strangely appropriate that this recent eruption of fandom took place there. The park is in Greenwich Village, the main location for the early 1960s rise to fame of the young Bob Dylan who is depicted in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which had concluded shooting in June. The movie premiered on Christmas Day, two months after the Chalamet look-alike jamboree.
Revisited after the release of Mangold’s Dylan biopic, the Washington Square hijinks reveal that Mitchell-as-Chalamet looks more like Dylan than Chalumet-as-Dylan does. The Russian doll dance-and-shell-game also sheds light on the sometimes curious ways of biopics, especially musical ones.
Mitchell was blessed with the more Dylan-like nose. Chalamet’s aquiline exemplar was thought by the filmmakers to require prosthetic enhancement. This fake nose was not nearly as massive and distracting as the cinematic schnozzes previously fitted onto Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro or Nicole Kidman as Virginia Wolf in The Hours. Even with his bespoke Bob-beak, Chalumet would never be mistaken for the real McCoy from Minnesota.
There are also ways of doing a nose job on the singing voice and the guitar-playing appendages. In Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace, the flashy pianist-entertainer’s hands were grafted by CGI onto Michael Douglass’s arms. These Las Vegas keyboard antics were utterly convincing on screen.
Chalamet, by contrast, does the singing and strumming himself, and has been garnering richly deserved plaudits for his performance of the Dylan tunes heard in A Complete Unknown. Mangold’s project had been planned before the pandemic, and the musically untrained Chalamet diligently set to work learning the guitar and etching his voice into Dylanesque texture. Delayed by Covid, Chalamet continued to work up his musical chops and learn his Dylan songs before the project went into production last year.
Having to watch fake riffs on a mute keyboard or violin can be as off-putting as an actor lipsynching songs to the real artist’s recordings since the speaking voice can be heard in the singing one, and vice-versa. The disparity between the spoken and sung word can become irritating to the point of distraction. But even with the voice, digital technology can be deployed to correct pitch or, in the present case, could have Dylan-ified the core Chalamet sonority, roughening the timbral grain, tweaking the nasal quality already aided and abetted by prosthesis.
Yet even the admirable program of musical skill-building undertaken by Chalamet, however impressive, can only fall short of its model. Adding to the confusion, there are scads of Dylan tribute bands out there with frontmen who are better musicians and mimics than Chalamet, even if they lack his star power.
Another way of querying the ontological difference between meticulously covering a song and acting a part is to wonder whether Chalamet-look-alike Mitchell can act that role as well as Chalamet can play and sing like Dylan. Lacking the celebrity brand, at least for now, maybe Mitchell has music in him too. He’s certainly got the Dylan look down, even if he was trying to be Chalamet in another guise.
It is a lot easier to strum your way through Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” delivered a few times by Chalamet in the film, than it is to toss off a Chopin Polonaise à la Liberace. In the hierarchy of technical challenges in music, learning a few chords is relatively easy as a musical task. That very accessibility allowed so many people to join in the folk music renaissance of the 1950s, the movement that helped birth Dylan’s art.
The Chalamet nose only approximates Dylan’s and the same is true for his guitar-playing. What so many movie directors seem to forget is that the hands are as expressive as the face, that mirror of emotion so fetishized by the Hollywood close-up. I don’t mean to be cruel about Chalamet’s musical efforts: he can indeed play and sing and it is fun to hear and watch him do so, even if his contorted left hand lacks the supple surety of Dylan’s and his right is sometimes hesitant and irregular in its strummings and occasional pickings.
Just arrived on the East Coast from Minnesota, Dylan makes his way early on in the film to Woody Guthrie’s hospital room in New Jersey to find Pete Seeger (done with quavering nobility by Ed Norton in the film’s best performance) there as well. Woody is rendered mute by a debilitating disease, but Seeger asks Dylan to play something and the complete unknown duly serves up “Song to Woody.” It’s a poignant, if fabricated, scene and an affecting performance by Chalamet, not least because one can hear and see the effort. The scene becomes not so much a magisterial demonstration of the power of method acting, but of meta-acting, a gifted actor demonstrating that he has put in the time and has the talent to pay tribute to Dylan analogously to the gifts that Dylan himself, at a much higher level of musicianship, has brought with him on this pilgrimage to meet his stricken idol.
A Complete Unknown is filled with music, and one is sincerely thankful for the screen time given it by Mangold, and for the practice time taken by Chalamet to get to where he has gotten.
But the film’s welcome concentration on performance and its reenactment (if in occasionally jumbled chronology) means that character development and the human relationships that should give the drama life and originality are reduced to set-piece moments of caddish unfaithfulness, narcissistic posturing, the Oedipal collision between father-figure Seeger and his renegade progeny, Dylan, who (hardly a spoiler) electrocutes the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 at the film’s overcooked climax. These amplifications and distortions of history accord with the imperatives of the Hollywood biopic, and the music is asked to carry the larger themes of genius and generational conflict but also to speak—to sing—for itself.
The film’s real problem, however, is not just that the fingers are as telling as the face, but that the moving, sounding images of the real Dylan are so ubiquitous in documentaries and recordings; much of this material instantly accessible on the internet. In the look-alike and sound-alike contest staged by A Complete Unknown, Dylan, forever young in black-and-white footage, beats Chalamet, hands and nose down, voice thrown to the wind.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
WILHELM HEINRICH OTTO DIX (2 December 1891 – 25 July 1969) was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)
DAY OF THE LOCUSTS
Oh, the benches were stained with tears and perspiration
The birdies were flying from tree to tree
There was little to say, there was no conversation
As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree
And the locusts sang off in the distance
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody
Oh, the locusts sang off in the distance
Yeah, the locusts sang and they were singing for me
I glanced into the chamber where the judges were talking
Darkness was everywhere, it smelled like a tomb
I was ready to leave, I was already walkin’
But the next time I looked there was light in the room
And the locusts sang, yeah, it give me a chill
Oh, the locusts sang such a sweet melody
Oh, the locusts sang their high whining trill
Yeah, the locusts sang and they were singing for me
Outside of the gates the trucks were unloadin’
The weather was hot, a-nearly 90 degrees
The man standin’ next to me, his head was exploding
Well, I was prayin’ the pieces wouldn’t fall on me
Yeah, the locusts sang off in the distance
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody
Oh, the locusts sang off in the distance
And the locusts sang and they were singing for me
I put down my robe, picked up my diploma
Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive
Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota
Sure was glad to get out of there alive
And the locusts sang, well, it give me a chill
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody
And the locusts sang with a high whinin’ trill
Yeah, the locusts sang and they was singing for me
Singing for me, well, singing for me
— Bob Dylan (1970)
PREFACE TO A TWENTY VOLUME SUICIDE NOTE
by Amiri Baraka
for Kellie Jones, born 16 May 1959
Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus . . .
Things have come to that.
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
Nobody sings anymore.
And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there . . .
Only she on her knees, peeking into
Her own clasped hands.
WHAT HAPPENED?
by Trevor Jackson
…Martin Wolf is probably the most influential economics commentator in the English-speaking world. He has been chief editorial writer for the Financial Times of London since 1987 and their lead economics analyst since 1996. Before that he trained in economics at Oxford and worked at the World Bank starting in 1971, including three years as senior economist and a year spent working on the first World Development Report in 1978. ‘The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism’ is his fifth book since moving to the Financial Times. The blurbs and acknowledgments are stuffed with central bankers, financiers, Nobel laureates, and celebrity academics. The bibliography contains 96 references to the author himself.
Wolf's diagnosis is impossible to dispute: “Neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, he observes, those values have run into crisis all over the world, and, especially since about 2008, “people feel even more than before that the country is not being governed for them, but for a narrow segment of well-connected insiders who reap most of the gains and, when things go wrong, are not just shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else.”
He describes in detail the mistaken policies of austerity in the US and Europe, the rise of a wasteful and extractive financial sector, the atomization and immiseration of formerly unionized workers, the pervasiveness of tax avoidance and evasion, and the general accumulation of decades of elite failure.
Most people have accurately realized “that these failings were the result not just of stupidity but of the intellectual and moral corruption of decision-makers and opinion formers at all levels — in the financial sector, regulatory bodies, academia, media, and politics.” And thus his conclusion: “Without ethical elites, democracy becomes a demagogic spectacle hiding a plutocratic reality. That also is its death.” Forty years of the corruption of our plutocratic elites has now led to what he views as an alarming populist reaction. Voters, especially young ones in the core democratic capitalist countries, have lost faith in the power of markets and liberalism. Serious international rivals have also emerged, in the forms of “demagogic authoritarian capitalism” in places like Turkey and Russia, and “bureaucratic authoritarian capitalism” in China, and Wolf views these systems, unlike earlier systemic rivals like communism, as serious threats. Liberal democratic capitalism is in danger both from within and without.…
(New York Review of Books)
MEMO OF THE WEEK
This looks like progress.
PRAYERS FOR THE WORLD—For Craig and Others
I’ve become, as an aging guy, a lover of obituaries, the last telling of a life’s tale. The New York Times does a good job of this, for those known and famous, and sometimes the unknown. The finest obits I’ve come across, though, are from The Economist (established, btw, in 1843). The last page of every edition features a finely written, nearly poetic story, of a life. All pieces in this journal go without attribution, so we don’t know who this obit artist is.
Here is the final part of a recent, beautiful one, about a follower of St. Francis, Brother Harold Palmer:
“…St. Francis ordered his followers to preach in towns, and did so himself. But he also made a habit of retiring to pray in remote and rocky places. Each Franciscan had to ask, as Francis did, whether he belonged in the world or not… Brother Harold definitely needed both, and when he first went to live at Shepherd’s Law, in 1971 in a cold caravan wrapped in straw-bales containing rats, he often wondered what on earth he was doing. He made sure to get a mobile phone.
He had decided to raise money for his hermitage-house by working in a geriatric ward, tending frail old men who steadily died around him. But at Shepherds Law fellow-friars and local people, from the village of Eglingham and round about, soon lent a hand. Traditionally, hermits and anchorites always drew visitors. Clearly most locals liked having this curious solitary nearby. As he built his hermitage—thick walls of local stone and concrete, clay pantiles on the roof—donations of material kept coming. Since sanitation for years was a slop-bucket and an Elsan, he exchanged dog-walking for baths. His letterbox was at the bottom of the hill, to save the postman trouble. Villagers would leave cakes and other offerings there. The Friends of Shepherds Law were set up to raise funds for him. Over his 50 years of hermithood he became a village character: smiling, scruffy, missing a front tooth, and devoted to his Thomas the Tank Engine woolly hat with earflaps.
His purpose there, though, was prayer. Prayer both Anglican, from the Book of Common Prayer, and Catholic, since in 2004 he had turned to Rome. He loved, and used, both liturgies together. At first there was nowhere to pray but in the biting wind; then in a lean-to against the ruined wall, roofed with corrugated iron. Money from his mother, after she died, paid for a beautiful Romanesque chapel in local stone, dedicated to St Mary and St Cuthbert, with icons and stained glass and a relic of Cuthbert under the altar. The walls contained fragments of brick gathered from the beach at Lindisfarne, his Holy Island. Seven times a day, for the canonical hours of matins, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline, Brother Harold would ring a medieval bell and enter to sing the Psalter. He had spent hours unearthing and translating Latin liturgies from archives in Durham and elsewhere, fitting them to Gregorian chant he had composed himself on the backs of envelopes. Chant, like his icons, pointed to the Mystery.
Usually he was alone. He had built four well-equipped cells for visitors, each with its upstairs oratory; quite a few stayed, but no one stayed for good. Perhaps they disliked the smell of paraffin lamps, or objected to the meals of cold baked beans. It didn’t matter too much. As long as he himself remembered God continually, as he did, and addressed Him on behalf of the world and its troubles, and allowed God to enter his heart and dwell there, all was well. Between the verses of the Psalms, sheep bleated outside. He was perfectly still. ■”
“Brother Harold Palmer lived alone in the wilds by choice:
The Northumbrian hermit died on October 4th, aged 93”
The Economist, 12/19/24
About the Supervisors’ “etiquette” instructions, specifically regarding “Constituent Complaints,” I have been stumped for months now by the non-responsiveness of Lake County’s “Citizen Complaint” system, requesting replies from County Counsel and at least two Department Heads in response to substantive questions for public information or assistance in bringing problems to the attention of the Board of Supervisors — a final step allegedly conducted by the Administration when the “complaint” is not resolved by the staff — and subsequent non-response to direct communications with the BoS on such matters.
Lake County Administration created a “Citizen Complaint” process (with a lot of “politically correct” wrangling over the word “citizen”) that theoretically logs and tracks those complaints through the system, but puts them first into the hands of those Department Heads who are identifiably responsible for the issue of concern to the complainant. When the recipient took the trouble to reply, the answers are vague promises to take corrective action, “someday,” or to “look into it,” with no commitment to provide any answers). Others have been “completed” by referring to an ordinance or resolution and calling it good. Requests to County Counsel are just ignored.
Similarly, various Public Record Act requests are dismissed as either “none of your business” (information available only “internally”), unheard of (“can you give me an example of what you’re looking for?” in request for a simple budget unit total), or “in the queue” for future work (no status or schedule).
Especially with regard to the County’s massive General Plan undertaking, “official” correspondence generated by appointed advisory committee members is not made available to the public, and significant concerns have been identified by the dozens of “authorized” participants that go into a virtual black hole.
In theory, Mendocino’s Board of Supervisors has a “governance committee” to whom citizen-originated requests can be directed, and Supervisor Haschak is its chair, although its public records are scant and “minutes” are years behind (if in fact the committee has been meeting).
“Constituents” expect their elected representatives to support their concerns, but in our regular Supervisors’ “Calendar” reports, “meeting with [unnamed] constituents” passes for a legitimate expenditure of their “work” for all of their District residents.
Mendo’s system for preventing your BOS members from “becoming intermediaries in departmental matters” to “ensure clear and efficient communication while respecting the workflow of all parties involved” depends on the integrity and willingness of your CEO as well as the intelligence of individual elected officials. Good luck with that.
As usual, thank you , Betsy, for your knowledge and understanding of our two little county governments, which are far from perfect and complicate so many issues.
As I have written before, I once had the good fortune, as a Child Welfare Services unit supervisor, to obtain the direct, critical help of a BOS member. She became an “intermediary in departmental matters” when no County staff persons–including our CWS deputy director– would assist me in having two critical social worker positions filled. While I was seen as a trouble-maker in asking for her help without admin. permission, this out-of-the-lines-of-authority action got the job done. No more power plays and bureaucratic nonsense, just direct help to get the necessary staff to do our job. So, there’s a good example of overriding rules when needed.
‘L.A proved too much for the man…
“Midnight Train to Georgia” by Gladys Knight & The Pips
https://pandora.app.link/kXgkXJ3b5Pb
L.A proved too much for the man
(Too much for the man)
(He couldn’t make it)
So, he’s leaving the life he’s come to know, oh
He said he’s going back to find
(Going back to find)
What’s left of his world
The world he left behind
Not so long ago
He’s leaving (leaving)
On that midnight train to Georgia (leaving on a midnight train)
Hmm, yeah
Said he’s going back (going back to find)
To a simpler place and time (and when he takes that ride)
Oh yes, he is (guess who’s gonna sit right by his side)
And I’ll be with him (I know you will)
On that midnight train to Georgia
(Leaving on a midnight train to Georgia)
I’d rather live in his world (live in his world)
Than live without him in mine (world, world)
(It’s his, his and hers alone)
He kept dreaming
(Dreaming)
Oh, that someday he’d be a star
(A superstar, but he didn’t get far)
But he sure found out the hard way
That dreams don’t always come true (dreams don’t always come true)
Oh no (uh-uh, no, uh-uh)
So he hung all his hopes
And he even sold his own car, hmm
Bought a one way ticket back
To the life that he once knew
Oh yes he did
He said he would
I know he’s leaving (leaving)
On that midnight train to Georgia (leaving on a midnight train)
Hmm, yeah…’
California Fire Facts | Governor Gavin Newsom
https://gavinnewsom.com/california-fire-facts/